


Four Things Balthier Didn’t Know About His Father and One Thing He Wished He Didn’t

by justsleepwalkin



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-08
Updated: 2012-04-08
Packaged: 2017-11-03 07:27:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justsleepwalkin/pseuds/justsleepwalkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Title pretty much sums it up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Things Balthier Didn’t Know About His Father and One Thing He Wished He Didn’t

**Author's Note:**

> This is olllld. I was perusing some of my stuff and found it and thought "Why not, let's post it." It's been a long time since I've played FFXII so editing it is pretty difficult. 
> 
> I did not check what year magicite replaced electricity, if Cid was even alive when such happened (though I believe he probably was), and try to see if there was anything on where this happened and who was involved.

**One: Wife was a sky pirate.**

 

When he first met her, he hadn’t expected anyone to be in the ruins. They were supposed to be abandoned, and yet she had smiled with a laugh and called it “home” and said that he was intruding. At a young age of twenty, he was flustered, and surprised, and left before he could even pick through the ruins of rumor. 

The second time he had come across her it was a mere three months later, and just as much of a surprise as the first. He was chasing down another rumor, and she had again called this place “home.” He frowned, asked if she was following him, and just how many homes she had.

“The Sky is my only home, and I think you've got it backwards: you seem to be following _me_ ,” she had answered, glee in her eyes, and then held out a dusty book to him from where she was perched on the ledge above. “I suppose this is what you could be looking for?”

“Is that…” his own eyes lit at the sight, and he reached out with a hand, almost hesitant, and disbelieving, “the book of Mid Lakor Voss? His notes on magicite?” She held it just out of reach, and seemed quite pleased with herself. “Please, I’ve been on the trail of that for –”

“Three months now? Hmm… so have I, actually. Wouldn’t the research do _wonders_?” she asked, but to him or the book, he couldn’t tell. She flipped through the pages with careful precision. The hands of a researcher. “To think that magicite could have the sort of power in it to replace electricity. And the airships! What it would mean for them!”

“Yes, yes, that’s right,” he rambled on, gesturing with his hands towards her and the book. “But most researchers and scientists of Ivalice don’t believe that it is even a possibility. A replacement? Surely! They think it is all jest.”

“The researchers of Ivalice are fools,” she answered, swinging her legs around the side before jumping down before him. She closed the book shut. “I almost wonder if you’re different. Following my trail, but not on purpose? Interesting, to have your own drive for the future. Can you make Ivalice a better place?”

He reached for the book again, but she still held it out of reach.

“Can you?” she repeated.

“I’d like to be able to at least have the opportunity to try,” he answered, watching her eyes now instead. It seemed to get him further along. 

“For everyone?”

“For everyone.”

She handed the book to him, and walked off before he could even protest. He didn’t follow, and later as he begun to stick his nose into the research, saw an airship streak across the fading light of the skies.

The third time they crossed paths he was already working his way up in the world, and because of that had already made his enemies. He _did_ want to make Ivalice better, for everyone, so why? Why did they turn their backs on him? Money. It was always about money. He growled to himself from where he found himself trapped, bouncing ideas off the four walls of the small room – both to find a way out, and for ways to enhance the change over from electricity to magicite. 

He hadn’t been expecting the door to open and reveal _her_ again. He was nearing his twenty-first birthday. This experience hadn’t been a way he would’ve wanted to celebrate, until she showed her colors again. “Funny, you aid my research, _and_ you save me from pirates. Aren’t you the remarkable one?”

“I heard there was treasure here,” she blinked, looking confused at his presence. “Well, I guess them and I can agree on something. I could see you as treasure. Come on, before their merry little band wakes up.”

He didn’t consider most of her words, and he followed her without thought. 

“How goes your work, kidnapping aside?” she asked him after he was in the safety of her airship. It was the first time in their meetings that they did not part ways immediately. But then, this time her only “home” was her ship, and he enjoyed the sense of flying, even if the ship wasn’t the same he remembered seeing fly away that one time.

“Progressing, slowly,” he answered. They remained in silence. She was taking him back to the imperial city. Perhaps she would like to see his labs? She was interested in the betterment of the people, after all. To see it with her own eyes? And a mind such as hers? She could enjoy it. “What have you been into?” ‘Up to’ hardly sounded the proper question – she always seemed to be head first into something, before Cid could have the same chance.

Few people were a step ahead of him.

“Finding treasure,” she tossed a grin in his direction. 

“Oh? Anything of interest?”

She laughed at him. “You.” And he blinked at that, remembering she mentioned something along the lines earlier, and it surprised him some. But she was already moving on topics, and let out a sigh as she steadily handled the controls. “My ship is gone. This one… doesn’t feel the Sky like that child did… It’s unnerving.”

He frowned. “Well, if you need a place to settle onto ground for awhile, my labs are always open.”

The grin was back, brightening up her eyes. “Why, such an offer so soon? And I don’t even know your name!”

She didn’t, he realized. He didn’t even know hers. There was only the Sky when he would think back to her while he flipped the pages of research from the old book. But none of it seemed to matter, because he stood by his offer, and she accepted. 

She lasted a year and four months before she confessed over several drinks one night after a breakthrough with the magicite that the Sky still pulled her – her ship, lost out to some faction, still called. He mentioned that she could take a ship at any time and go fly. “Sky pirates are drawn to one ship and one ship alone, like mating for life,” she responded, a haze in her eyes.

He tried to stifle his reaction as best he could. Sky pirate? The one who had been assisting him for a year and four months – no, nearly two years now – was a _pirate_? But that… that made…

… It made far too much sense. He had hung his head and realized that when the research hit its end and the magicite took full bloom over the airships of Ivalice, that she would be gone, to her first love of the Sky, and in search of her second love of her ship. 

The one bright, female mind that could keep up with his own would fly away.

 

But she stayed. She _stayed_.

 

**Two: She died a sky pirate.**

 

She frowned, looking away and trying not to weigh down too hard on things. It wasn’t that either of them wanted this to happen, but… It was the way things were going. They knew the time would come, and he always expected it to come sooner – not after three children. Not after twenty years of knowing each other; fourteen of which they were married.

“How many pirates do you see live past thirty?” he asked her and she stared sadly at him.

“You could still come with me, you know,” she said instead.

“The Sky in my eyes is different from what you see,” he answered with a shake of his head.

“Still…”

“You know I won’t.”

She nodded. “I know.” After a moment, she glanced away, towards that sky that she was ready to fly through again. Her ship – her second love – found again, in their background. She had three loves in life: the Sky, that ship, and Cidolfus. “Don’t…” she hesitated. Swallowed. “Don’t tell Ffamran. I’d like… one of our sons… not to be tempted by these skies…”

“So would I.”

 

She lived to thirty-five, and even though it was longer than thirty, when Cid got word that the familiar airship had met its crash in a battle over ancient grounds with its chamber filled with gold, he cried; the baby Ffamran cooed in his arms. 

 

**Three: She named Ffamran.**

 

He may have given her a strange look when she said it, but it wasn’t something he thought of much now, when he was buried in the piles of work strewn across his desk. It was different, which maybe was why she chose it, out of the blue or thought up long before. It wasn’t Nicodemus Demen Bunansa, or his twin Marcellus Nolen Bunansa. 

No, _Ffamran_ Mid Bunansa was the odd-one out. But the boy never asked, never denied it until one year changed everything. And then the next time Cidolfus heard of a Bunansa other than himself was as _Balthier_ and Cidolfus scowled darkly at it, not just because of the running and the pirating, but because of the name he cast aside. Did he really believe it was his father who donned the name over the young child? Or did he know that when he cast that part of him away, that he was ridding himself completely of his mother, the one that in the end, he turned out to be like?

Yes, Cidolfus wondered, how much more like his mother he would be. The name “Ffamran” may have been the only thing protecting him from an ill-fate. Would he live past thirty-five? Or would he die like all the other pirates?

_“The Sky is my only home.”_

Why? Why, when she asked him not to tell the boy of the Sky and the treasure – why did he have to be so much like her? 

 

**Four: He wanted to make Ivalice better for Ffamran’s sake.**

 

“Thank you, Venat,” he nodded to his right side briefly, before jotting down more notes, occasionally picking up a shard of the stone and staring, entranced by it. “This shall do nicely, I believe. We’re growing closer.” _Finally_ a break in research that he started long ago – something that would improve Ivalice forever. They were puppets of their puppeteers and Cidolfus could not have that; what sort of children could grow up in this world? He already had two, lost up in the tides of the gods – he often wondered what mischief they found themselves. No, no he would not have it again. As soon as he _knew_ the truth, as soon as Venat chose him to be enlightened, he would fix this problem.

Man and child deserved to weave their own path. With the manufacted nethicite – still in its beginning stages – he would be at level with these Occurian gods and cast them aside from Ivalice’s future.

_“For everyone?”_

_“For everyone.”_

 

For Ffamran.

 

He didn’t catch the shadow looming across the dusty floor, the outlines of a Judge suit, or even the clanking as a figure walked away. He didn’t know how long it may have been there, and nodded to something Venat was saying, mumbling and tracing a finger over a line of figures. 

 

**Five: His old man was insane.**

 

Ffamran couldn’t stand to watch. Everyone had a breaking point, and at sixteen, it was time for his. Every day had been getting worse, and he had come to the point where none of his words were getting through to the old man. Madness because of a _stone_ – what good was Giruvegan? This place must have been cursed; few people went to it, or even heard of it, anyway. The place and the stone, and this “Venat” – Ffamran hated it. All of it. 

He stood in the doorway of the study, having cast away the clanking metallic suit of a Judge, arms crossed over a simple white shirt. “I wonder,” he said aloud, “how long it will take you to realize that I’m _gone_.” It did not surprise him that the man in the room did not look up, and continued to mumble to himself. 

Ffamran heard the rumors. They followed him into the streets and on his duties. Side comments behind his back, wondering if the babbling fool’s son would go crazy as well.

Oh yes, Ffamran would go crazy, but a different sort. It was the sort where he couldn’t stand to watch his own father, whom he had once respected, break apart and shatter and only leave this _shell_ of what he was. His father was dead, Ffamran realized. He had no family left in Ivalice as far as he as concerned. He never heard from his brothers; but maybe they knew this would one day happen, and got away when they could?

Ffamran was alone.

It was troublesome. Arcades… He couldn’t stay. He just couldn’t. He’d get as far away, start a new life, a new him, and the only thing that he would keep as a reminder to stay away would be the name _Bunansa_. 

 

As if he ever used it.

**Author's Note:**

> My initial notes of where the idea of this: it all came about as sort of random musings. We know nothing of Cid's past other than the going insane bit after Giruvegan. I thought one day "Damn, wouldn't it be funny if his wife had been a pirate?" and yeah, these sort were produced. So yeah :D Who knows~
> 
> I honestly believe there was a time that Cid wanted to improve Ivalice for the sake of his children (or at least for the sake of man in general), but his intentions were slowly corrupted.


End file.
